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by fighterpilot 1811 days ago
You're attempting a reductio ad absurdum but it's not valid because the meteorite has a tiny prior probability of being true, whereas the lab leak doesn't have such a tiny prior due to historical precedent of it happening a number of times, even if it is much less likely to be true as the zoonotic origin explanation in the case of COVID.
1 comments

Thank you. I think this discussion makes more sense if one has a basic understanding of Bayesianism – one starts with a prior probability, one then has various pieces of evidence and associated conditional probabilities than one uses to update that probability, and then one arrives at a posterior probability after updating based on those pieces of evidence. I was talking about the conditional probability for one particular piece of evidence; I was never saying anything about the prior or posterior probability. Obviously you, and others, get this, but it seems bellyfullofbac doesn't.